Scientists create ball lightning in lab

Rock 'n Roll legend Jerry Lee Lewis immortalised them in his biggest ever hit - and now scientists have created real "Great Balls of Fire" in the lab.

The mysterious phenomenon of ball lightening has been unravelled after Brazilian researchers cooked up a simple recipe for similar eerie orbs - even getting them to bounce around for several seconds.

It is believed the stunning spectacle occurs when lightening strikes any silica present in soil and turns into pure silicon vapour.

As the vapour cools the silicon condenses into a floating aerosol bound into a ball by charges that gather on its surface - and it glows with the heat of silicon recombining with oxygen.

Using currents of up to 140 amps the researchers zapped wafers of silicon between two electrodes and created luminous orbs the size of ping-pong balls that persisted for 8 seconds - making them the longest-lived 'great balls of fire' ever made in the lab.

Thousands of people have reported seeing ball lightening - a luminous sphere that sometimes appears during thunderstorms.

It is typically the size of a grapefruit and lasts for a few seconds or minutes sometimes hovering or even bouncing along the ground.

One eyewitness saw a glowing ball burn through the screen door of a house in Oregon, navigate down to the basement and wreck an old mangle while in another report a similar orb bounced on a Russian teacher's head more than
twenty times before vanishing.

Study leader Dr Antonio Pavao, of the Federal University of Pernambuco, said: "The luminous balls seem to be
alive."

He says their fuzzy surfaces emitted little jets that seemed to jerk them forward or sideways - as well as smoke
trails that formed spiral shapes suggesting the balls were spinning.

From their blue-white or orange-white colour Dr Pavao's team estimates they have a temperature of about 2,000
Kelvin. Water boils at 373 K.

The balls were able to melt plastic - and one even burned a hole in Dr Paiva's jeans, reports New Scientist.

Earlier experiments using microwaves created luminous balls but they disappeared milliseconds after the microwaves
were switched off.

Dr Pavao, whose findings will be published in Physical Review Letters, said: "The lifetimes of our fireballs are about a hundred or more times higher than that obtained by microwaves."

Chemical engineer Professor John Abrahamson, who was the first to explain the mechanism of ball lightning in 2002, is thrilled.

Prof Abrahamson, of Canterbury University in Christchurch, New Zealand, said: "It made my year when I heard about it.

"The balls - although still small - lasted long enough to come into the mainstream of observed natural ball lightning."

Dr Pavao's team is currently working out the chemical reactions involved in the balls' formation and experimenting
with other materials that could also work including pure metals, alloys and sulphur compounds.

Lewis was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 for his pioneering contribution to the genre and in 2004 Rolling Stone Magazine ranked him at number 24 on their list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time

[+/-] show/hide this post

Source: Life Style Extra